Let's start with the basics. What, exactly, is an orbital data center?
On the ground, data centers are typically large, warehouse-sized facilities filled with racks of storage and servers, and usually some high-speed networking gear to connect everything. A data center can be small or large, but the ones SpaceX is looking to supplant are of the big kind—the ones operated by major industry players like Amazon Web Services and Google, which provide most of the online services you use today. These are sprawling buildings, or even campuses of buildings, with redundant connections to the electrical grid, on-site generators, massive banks of batteries, and enormous cooling systems to handle the heat being shed by thousands upon thousands of machines operating around the clock.
An orbital data center replicates all of that, but in space.
